Sunday, October 17, 2010

Odds and Ends

Ghostcrawler on Holy Paladins

Nice long post by GC on the state of holy paladins. Very interesting read.

Right now, I think we're a little skewed because mana restrictions aren't in yet. With infinite mana at 80, the other classes are able to put out a lot of healing to multiple targets, which is our weak point. We don't get our main AoE spell until 83, and Beacon got drastically weakened. However, when mana restrictions become stronger, things may be more equal.

Cataclysm trailer

The Cataclysm trailer is online. It's pretty good, but I think the Wrath trailer was just more elegant.

Lord of the Rings Online

Since Lord of the Rings Online went F2P, I've been giving it a whirl. I've been levelling a Guardian. It's fun, but I'm approaching the point where I need to decide whether to pay for stuff or not.

Reforging

As predicted, Reforging has become mandatory for endgame raiding. Kind of honestly, it's a serious annoyance. I haven't reforged my Holy gear, because I'm not having mana problems, and the theorycraft on the other three stats is all over the place.

But then I reforged Ret gear, and trying to maximize stats while hitting the hit cap, expertise cap, and haste softcap was a trying exercise.

Ahh well, I expect someone will make a program to tell you what the optimal reforging pattern is.

14 comments:

The reaction in my guild to the holy changes has ranged from depression to outright hatred. I think Blizz has a big PR challenge on its hands. But I took an alt into a 5-man last night and, well, I really enjoyed it.

There's a lot more complexity to healing now, which I guess is not to everyone's taste, but I think it's a mistake to fixate on the raw numbers. Things *will* be ok in Cata, even if it takes a couple of buffs to get there. The main thing is: do you enjoy this style of healing anymore?

The new beacon didn't hurt nearly as much as I thought it would, and having access to more instants made me feel less rooted. I've not really got used to protector of the innnocent yet, but I can only imagine how useful it would be in Icecrown. Judging by the amount it heals, you may never need to heal yourself directly again. And I love light of dawn, although it takes a bit of shuffling to get everyone in line (or maybe because of that). The only thing I really struggled with was all the different haste buffs and procs. My heals seemed to cast at different speeds every time, and I haven't assimilated them yet to know what to cast when.

Lone Lands is a good value; even not on sale, though if you wanted you could put LOTRO on the back burner for a bit to see if it gets another sale. You shouldn't have any problems getting enough points from deeds in game to pay for the zone, without needing to spend any cash.

The quests in LL are pretty good, and the zone is fun. Leveling without questing is possible, but ends up being less fun in my experience. (Daily skirmishes are helpful in that regard, but even so I think you'll prefer having a zone to quest in too.)

@Merlot - After a Holy Shock, you'll always get a cast time discount on HL and DL (Speed of Light). If your Holy Shock crits, you'll get a very fast HL (Infusion of Light). Since HL will consume both speed buffs at once but DL will only consume Speed of Light, the logic is to cast a DL right after Holy Shock, then a HL if Infusion of Light is procced.

I'm finding it easy in theory but very difficult to apply in practice.

Its interesting, healing with a rotation/proc mindset. GC's comments the new Holy Pally healing style were pretty much what I had figured and I'm looking forward to seeing how things go at 85. I just wish we weren't left out to hang for the few weeks before Cataclysm.

I was disheartened at first when going through my weekly ICC25. Once I realized that I can use FoL with impunity, things started looking much better. It's unfortunate that I'll have to completely break myself of this habit come Cata and the new mana costs, but such is the nature of the game.

Also, pally healing is now very, very strong in PvP. The combination of the Blessed Life talent for Holy Power, Eternal Glory for Holy Power savings, Protector of the Innocent, Enlightened Judgements for further self healing and Last Word for WoG punch is ridiculous. I'd say nearly broken at 80 it's so stupid good, but hopefully balanced for 85, because I love the play style.

Every pally should grab their Holy PvP set and go give it a swing. You won't be disappointed.

I'm very confused on why people are having mana problems and healing issues (especially on the post that GC replied to). Last week I hit 80 on my pally, and "bought" my way up in some gear, I have both ICC patterns, two T9 pieces and 3 pieces of PVP gear (as I pvp'ed my way to 80 on weekends) and I'm not even sweating ICC10 yet.

Last night I pretty much healed the last half of the festergut encoutner myself while our priest went OOM and one tank was down. We managed to win the battle (with our pally wiping off stacks of festers funstuffs by bubbling). For reference, I have about a 4500 gear score (for a general idea of gear set) and kept up a pally and 7-members myself and still had 70% of my mana when the battle was finished.

I'm raid healing ICC10, using my new pally over my geared druid for fun. It seems very simple and mana has not been an issue, healing has not been and issue either.

The only difference in raid healing, from what my team noticed, was that players were riding at 40-60% health through much of the encounters instead of 100%. As a druid, you can HoT your targets and leave them to cook and negate any standard damage ticks on encounters like festergut and rotface. Not so easy with a pally, but I can also instant heal almost anyone to full when really needed and beacon our tank to help the priest tank healer.

I did this by removing FoL as a healing option; I just never use it. Holy Wrath, Glory and a few Holy Lights became my core spells and ever since than mana was not an issue (I've not used Hands at all since 4.0.1.)

When I was still doing my FoL spamming, mana was almost impossible to hold on to, just splashing it all over the place. Now, by adjusting my strategy to healing, my mana regenerates faster than I can use it (my pool is around 28k in ICC10.)

I can only imagine what my Holy Pally will be like when I actually get T10 gear and start replacing some of these PVP pieces.

I rather like the current changes, Light of Dawn is like a flamethrower of awesomeness - even though its a cone, but still I can aim it for maximum coverage. However, until the restrictions come out Im going to hold off before a final decision.

@derrick SchommerThe only reason you have no issues with your mana is: Your throughput probably sucks so much it's not even funny anymore (probably that's the reason why the priest was going oom)

I have 3 heals at 80 (dual spec priest, shaman and paladin).

I've done many raids with all my chars since the patch went live. And I never experienced any mana issues at all in 10mans as long as the other healer was not a paladin :) In that case I was forced to heal for 2 (or wipe when i was also on my pally :))

Don't get too excited that your healing will improve with better equip. It won't as long as you are not willing to burn through your mana like mad. And even then all other healers will heal much more than you and carry you a big part of the way. Healing with the paladin is fun (at least for the pally ;)), but our guild has made the cut and dropped all of them in 10mans and 25mans, because there is no reason to stress the rest of the healers with such a subpar healer.

At the moment I doubt paladins will be competitive even with level 85. There are so many flaws with their healing style that I will prefer every other healer to be my co healers in raids.

@Anonymous It's unfortunate that your guild benched them all, since Blizzard just recently hotfixed in a buff to the 5 main Paladin single target heals (FoL, HL, DL, HS, & WoG). It might be worth it to give them a second shot before declaring things hopeless. =P

@Anonymous I was referring specifically to the throughput concerns and your guild as a whole. If you personally still have misgivings, that's perfectly fine and I can see where you're coming from, even though I'll hold off until I actually experience Cataclysm raids first-hand before making up my own mind. I was just saying it's a shame for an entire guild to give up on Holy Paladins solely because of circumstances that may have already changed. =)